House speaker fighting prayer ban

Calling Hamilton ruling intolerable, Bosma will appeal to high court if he must.

Calling Hamilton ruling intolerable, Bosma will appeal to high court if he must.

December 15, 2005|MARTIN DeAGOSTINO Tribune Staff Writer

INDIANAPOLIS -- Intolerable, unworkable, overreaching. House Speaker Brian Bosma applied those words last month to a federal court order banning invited clergy and lay people from praying in Jesus' name -- or any other deity's -- from the speaker's lectern of the House of Representatives. On Wednesday, Bosma said he will appeal the ruling and take the fight as far as he legally can, including to the U.S. Supreme Court if that is necessary. "I believe it's a critical fight, really a cultural fight, for not just our state, but our nation today," said Bosma, R-Indianapolis. "I don't desire to be on the cutting edge of that, but this ruling overreaches so far, I believe it has to be vigorously fought." Bosma's immediate fight involves two motions before U.S. District Judge David F. Hamilton, who issued the order after a nonjury trial. The motions ask Hamilton to reconsider his order and to stay its enforcement while he reconsiders. Bosma also filed a notice of appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. He said Hamilton's ruling is so broad that virtually any prayer is forbidden, even if it avoids the many names of God. Bosma also maintained that Hamilton's order tramples the First Amendment rights of people who want to pray as they believe in the House of Representatives. "Our nation, and this state, were founded upon the notion of free speech, including free religious speech," Bosma said. "And I believe it's very inappropriate for a federal judge to tell a visiting man or woman of faith ... what they can or cannot say in the Indiana House of Representatives." Hamilton's 60-page order rejected that logic, noting that even Bosma acknowledged that prayers offered from the speaker's lectern represent government, not individual, speech. That means they are subject to the First Amendment's ban on religious establishment, Hamilton said, not its protections of speech and religious exercise. Daniel O. Conkle, a constitutional scholar at Indiana University who writes on religion and the law, said Hamilton's opinion reflects prevailing doctrine established by the U.S. Supreme Court, and is unlikely to be reversed on appeal. That doctrine holds that government cannot express a preference for one religion over another, Conkle said, even though prayer and religious references have never been banished from public life. "But the history of the United States ... is a history that supports a relatively generalized governmental invocation of God," he said, "as opposed to a more specific or particularistic invocation of a Christian God or of any other more specific conception of God."